Who Was Dracula?

While I've been immersing myself in all things Dracula this fall, I thought I'd take a look at a historical account, and picked out Who Was Dracula? by Jim Steinmeyer. It's a good subject--who were the real influences behind Bram Stoker's fictional character--but unfortunately this book is poorly written, unfocused, and not very well argued.

I thought the book would give me a lot of information about Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, who gave Stoker the name Dracula. But there is not that much about him. Instead it is sort of a biography of Stoker and some fairly fanciful notions of other inspirations for the character, including, of all people, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. The last thing I expected in reading this book was to get an abbreviated biography of Wilde and his imprisonment for indecent behavior.

The core of the book is Stoker and his relationship with the actor Henry Irving. Stoker, for almost thirty years, was Stoker's right hand man and manager of the Lyceum Theater. Stoker was a critic in Dublin and sought out Irving's friendship. Many believe that Irving was a basis for Dracula, but after reading Steinmeyer's book I get the sense that Stoker may have created Dracula as a possible character for Irving to play (though Irving hated it). Irving was not a nice man, and treated some people horribly, but there's nothing her to indicate that he was a bad boss for Stoker.

The chapters on Whitman and Wilde are less convincing, and I don't know if Steinmeyer really believes it, though he does write: "I believe that the most important elements of Dracula were inspired by four people: poet Walt Whitman's bold carnality; author Oscar Wilde's corrupting immorality; actor Henry Irving's haunted characterse, and murderer Jack the Ripper's mysterious horrors." I'll buy the Ripper's influence, has Stoker began work on Dracula two years after those Whitechapel horrors, but I'm less convinced about the rest.

Despite the dubious arguments, there are some interesting nuggets here regarding the writing, especially concerning the connections to Vlad the Impaler. "Researchers have speculated that Stoker's knowledge of Transylvania came from Arminius Vambery, a Jewish-born adventurer from Hungary...Vambery would have been familiar with the traditions, languages, and landscape of Transylvania." We are also told "Stoker was never aware of more than the name and several historical facts. He had not read of the voivode's career or his reputation." Note though this is all second-hand information.

I don't think there's anything here that can't be found in other books, and that there's no original research here. Furthermore, the writing is often clunky. Consider this sentence: "His namesake, Abraham Senior, was twenty years older than his wife, a civil servant who worked a monotonous job in the parliamentary section of Dublin Castle." This makes it sound like the wife is the civil servant. We get her name in the next sentence, which makes the whole passage scream for an editor, as does the whole book, which is aimless and highly speculative.

I'm sure Dracula fans can find many better books about Stoker, Vlad, and the whole shebang.